WYOMING — Add one hour of instruction per day. Multiply that by 183 school days. Then divide that by 6.25, the number of daily hours Holy Name of Jesus students spent in class last year.

And take your time: You’ve got the equivalent of almost 30 more school days to figure it out.

Holy Name, now called San Juan Diego Academy, will have an extended school day when classes start Aug. 30.

“We found that many studies showed that kids who put in a little extra time every day excel academically,” said Teresa Prevette, a kindergarten and first-grade teacher at the 130-student, K-8 Catholic school, 1650 Godfrey Ave. SW in Wyoming. “Because many of our children don’t speak English at home, having an extra hour of speaking English will really help them just solidify their learning a little better.

“Also, we have a lot to teach. We just need more time. Not that we’re covering more material, but we’re letting them cover it a little more in-depth.”

Michigan several years ago dropped a 180-day standard in favor of requiring at least 1,098 annual hours of instruction in no fewer than 165 days, with that changing in 2012-2013 to 1,098 hours in no fewer than 170 days.

Many area schools meet that with roughly 6.25 hours of daily teaching. Hudsonville, for example, holds class for 6 hours and 15 minutes per day in elementary schools, and daily middle school instruction in Grandville runs 6 hours 14 minutes.

Now, each school day at San Juan Diego will last from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. instead of 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. Accounting for lunch time and an afternoon snack break, students will get about 7 hours and 15 minutes of daily instruction.

“The teachers here and my staff were really the impetus. They were the ones that were requesting this additional time,” Principal Rosa Fraga said. “They wanted to have the additional time for providing their lessons at a more profound level, more breadth and more depth.”

Some area schools run variations of a full-year schedule, but that would be “too unwieldy” and expensive for San Juan Diego, Fraga said. Instead, staff plan to teach the extra hour without extra pay, though Fraga said the school is seeking grants to fund more compensation because “it’s not right for us to expect them to do that.”

Said Prevette: “Having an extra hour of teaching is actually going to make our life easier. Next year the third-graders are going to come to third grade more prepared.”